Datum: Sat, 10 Sep 2005 05:22:35 -0700 (PDT)
Von: Erzen Shkololli <erzenshkololli at yahoo.com>
Betreff: History started playing with my life
History started playing with my life
16.09- 29.09.2005
Curator: Erzen Shkololli
Artists Participating:
Maja Bajevic
Sokol Beqiri
Goran Devic
Dalibor Martinis
Sejla Kameric
Anri Sala
Milica Tomic
Jasmila Zbanic
Opening, Friday:
16.09.2005, 20:00
Organized by:The Kosovo Art Gallery
“Conflict, trauma, militarism, cultural erasure,
redefinition of identities, collapsing systems,
cultural revolutions, ethnical cleansing,
migration, post-communism, globalization, modes
of capitalism, unions, global and local
realities, televised realities, privatization,
possession, occupation, segregation, separation,
borders, ignorance..."
When start to think about this project to due e
video exhibition it crossed my mind that today
there are many situation in the world that might
match with such description. However, looking
back into my personal story, experience and
historical background I realized that there's one
matching perfectly almost all the definitions
given above, and that is the situation in ex
Yugoslavia, as biggest geographical area in the
Balkans. Thus I started to parade an endless
number of works from many artists that have dealt
with this situation, until I decided to track
down a red thread that links several of them, as
distinguished from the others. Since my point of
departure was my personal experience of such
situation I started to look for artists who have
dealt with the above situations also from a
personal perspective and experience. Thus the red
thread which makes these artists works correspond
with each other: each work shows an aspect of the
war or of its consequences as experienced
individually from these artists. Besides, the
works are related to social, political and
cultural changes in real time but in different
circumstances. They are dealing with identity
issues, as well as with issues of history and
memory, consequences and trauma from the war, and
so on and so forth. But all of this presented
from a very personal experience, drawn out of
personal encounters or perceptions of what has
been going on in this area plagued by
restlessness.
What makes it even more thrilling to me is that
in these “personalized” works we move away from a
standard notion of geography as physical
territory, and enter some kind of "personal
geography" that helps presenting the works not as
a philosophic generalization on war or conflict,
but as something suffered directly on one's skin.
As Maja Bajevic, artist from Sarajevo says:
“Tragedies like war and the disintegration of a
country are usually seen as general, political
things. Actually there are personal, very
personal events of our lives that we carry, and
wear like a dress.” One can see that war was a
very personal event of their lives. And also what
is important to mention is the generation of the
artists selected; they belong to a generation
that witnessed all these changes and also had a
chance to live in the time when ex-Yugoslavia
still existed as one country, (Tito time); then
they're gone through Milosevic's regime; and then
we have the generation of artists how they grew
up during the wartime.
Erzen Shkololli